Beatles (58 page)

‘It’s not so bad these days, but it happens. Cyn was attacked not long ago in the street. Some girl kicked her on the legs and
said she had to leave John alone, or else. Isn’t it amazing, after all the years that John and Cyn have been married?

‘I’m still very frightened when I see a gang of girls in the street. I can’t face them. I have to go the other way. I always think perhaps they’re going to hit me.’

Being a Beatle wife, like being a Beatle, produces difficult relationships with old friends, as well as new ones. Her sister Jennie – who works in the Apple Boutique – is very close to her and spends a lot of time with her at the house. She is also very interested in Indian religion and culture. But apart from Jennie, Pattie has few close friends.

‘People will suddenly make a snide remark – “It’s all right for you, you can afford to do that.” That sort of thing. Old friends you would think wouldn’t come out with such silly things.

‘It comes out with new people you meet as well. You think, here’s a nice person, then they say something that shows they think I’m different. The other day I was doing a bit of work for
Vogue
and a woman said, “I don’t think of you as a model now, you’re more of a celebrity.” I’m not an actress or a star or anything. I’m just me, as I always was.

‘The wives have got to do something, when they’re hours and hours in the recording studio. We have ideas, but the next thing, we’re all leaving Esher anyway, going off to our hundred-acres estate in the country, and then it was Greece or somewhere. There’s always these mad ideas around.

‘I would like to do something, on my own. I took up the piano and went to lessons for a time. But it was going to take too long to be any good. I do believe you can do anything you want, if you spend enough time at it, but that was too late.

‘Then I went to a clairvoyant, who said my grandmother had played the violin and that I was meant to play it as well. I don’t know how she knew my grandmother was a violinist. So I thought I’d try. I went to lessons for a while. But that was worse. You’ve really got to start the violin young.

‘I’m now learning the dilruba – that’s an Indian instrument. I’m also going to Indian dancing classes under Ram
Gopal. It’s lovely. Jennie and I go every day before he does his ballet rehearsals.

‘I just don’t want to be the little wife sitting at home. I want to do something worthwhile.’

Pattie is involved in all things Indian, but George, as with everything he has always taken up, does it almost with a fanaticism. He used to practise the guitar till his fingers bled. Now he sometimes plays the sitar all day long. When he’s not doing that, he is reading book after book on religion.

He’s not cranky about it. As he goes on and learns more, he becomes more humble and more light-hearted about it. He doesn’t preach as much, although there is always the danger, when he is being quoted, of making him appear more fanatical than he is. Paul and John would have been the first to cut down his pretensions or to mock his illusions, if there had been any.

Even from the first, before Maharishi came along, as George was discovering Buddhism and yoga for himself, the others were as fascinated to hear what he’d found as he was.

‘Look at this book. An Indian gave us each a copy of it when we were in the Bahamas. It’s signed and dated 25 February 1965. My birthday. I’ve only recently opened it, since I became interested in India. It’s fantastic. That Indian really was something. You can tell by his name, it’s really a title, showing you how learned he is.

‘I now know it was part of a pattern. It was all planned that I should read it now. It all follows a path, just like our path. John, Paul and George converged, then a little later Ringo. We were part of that action, which led to the next reaction. We’re all just little cogs in an action that everyone is part of.

‘The only thing that is important in life is Karma, which means, roughly, actions. Every action has a reaction, which is equal and opposite. Everything that’s done has a reaction, like dropping this cushion down, see, there’s a dent in it.

‘Your Samsara is the recurrence of all your lives and deaths. We’ve been here before. I don’t know what as, though the friends you had in the previous life are likely to be the friends
you have in this life. You hate all the people you hated last time. As long as you hate, there will be people to hate. You go on being reincarnated, till you reach the absolute truth. But heaven and hell are just a state of mind. Whatever it is, you create it.

‘We were made John, Paul, George and Ringo because of what we did last time, it was all there for us, on a plate. We’re reaping what we sowed last time, whatever it was.

‘The reason why we’re all here is to achieve perfection, to become Christ-like. Each soul is potentially divine. This actual world is an illusion. It’s been created by worldliness and identification with objects. It doesn’t matter what happens, the plan can’t be affected, even having wars or dropping an H-bomb. None of it matters. Of course, it
does
matter to the people concerned, and a bomb would be terrible, but it’s only what happens in ourselves that ultimately matters.

‘I used to laugh when I read about Cliff Richard being a Christian. I still cringe when I hear about it, but I know that religion and God are the only things that exist. I know some people think I must be a nutcase. I find it hard not to myself sometimes, because I still see so many things in an ordinary way. But I know that when you believe, it’s real and nice. Not believing, it’s all confusion and emptiness.

‘Life will all work out, as long as you don’t bullshit. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’ve blacked out most things that happened to me before I was about 19. I’ve got so much going forward now. I see so many possibilities. I’m beginning to know that all I know is that I know nothing.’

Transcendental meditation came along just at this stage. He was looking for something and someone to tie all the ends together. He has never missed a day’s meditation since he started, unlike the others. Now and again they forget, or are too busy.

The other big part of George’s life is his music. John and Paul were knocking out songs together from the day they met. But George never got round to it for a long time, although he helped with an instrumental piece they did on their Hamburg records.
His songs have always been created separately from John and Paul’s. He does them completely on his own. In this, as in other recent things, he has influenced them – making them aware of Eastern rhythms and instruments.

George’s first song did not appear till their second long-playing record,
With The Beatles
, in the November of 1963. It was called ‘Don’t Bother Me’. He wrote it in a Bournemouth hotel during a tour. He had been ill and was resting.

‘I was a bit run-down and was supposed to be having some sort of tonic, taking it easy for a few days. I decided to try to write a song, just for a laugh. I got out my guitar and just played around till a song came. I forgot all about it till we came to record the next LP. It was a fairly crappy song. I forgot about it completely once it was on the album.’

He forgot about writing songs for almost two years after that. ‘I was involved in so many other things that I never got round to it.’

George rather plays down his Beatle songs, considering them a very minor sideline. He can’t remember how many he’s written and isn’t even clear which albums he did songs for.

His next songs were on the LP
Help!
, which appeared in the August of 1965. He did two for this, ‘I Need You’ and ‘You Like Me Too Much’.

He did two songs for
Rubber Soul
in the December of 1965 – ‘Think For Yourself’ and ‘If I Needed Someone’. When he was trying to think of the LPs he’d written songs for he forgot to mention this. Both of these were well up to the standards of the rest of the songs on that album.

For
Revolver
, which appeared in August 1966, he wrote his biggest number of songs so far on one LP. He did three – ‘Taxman’, ‘I Want To Tell You’ and ‘Love You To’. This last one was one of the first using Indian instruments, in this case the tabla, a fashion which was soon copied by hundreds of pop groups in Britain and America.

His songs after this were much more Indian, reflecting his growing knowledge of the sitar and of Indian music. ‘Within
You, Without You’, which has good words as well as haunting music, is perhaps his finest song to date. This appeared on
Sergeant Pepper
in June 1967. It was followed, at Christmas time 1967, by ‘Blue Jay Way’ for
Magical Mystery Tour
, and, in March 1968, by his first song for a Beatle single, ‘The Inner Light’.

‘I began to write more songs when I had more time, especially when we began to stop touring. Having the Indian things so much in my head it was bound to come out.’ He has great difficulty getting the right sort of trained Indian musicians for studio sessions in London. For ‘Within You, Without You’ and ‘Blue Jay Way’ he spent weeks finding and auditioning people who could play Indian instruments. There were no full-time professionals in England playing the instruments he wanted.

‘They have jobs like bus driving during the day and only play in the evening, so some of them just weren’t good enough, but we still had to use them. They were much better than any Western musician could do, because it at least is their natural style, but it made things very difficult. We spent hours just rehearsing and rehearsing.’

George’s sessions take even longer than the Lennon–McCartney songs. As with theirs, George Martin also helps, and so do they, but George is in charge. Groups of very strange- looking Indian gentlemen with very strange-looking instruments come into the studio and sit cross-legged and play to George so that he can hear what they can do.

Up until now, there’s also been the problem of writing down the music for them to play. Most of them can’t read Western music.

For George’s early Indian songs, the Indian musicians just had to pick up the tunes by watching George play them. Not even Big George Martin can read Indian music.

Now George is very well versed in Indian script. He has taught himself to write down his songs in Indian script, so that the Indian musicians can play them.

‘Instead of quavers and dots written across lines, Indian music is written down very simply, like our tonic sol-fa. Instead
of Doh, Ray, Me and so on, they sing Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, Sa. Often they don’t have words for songs, but just sing those notes. You indicate how high or low, or how long each one is by putting little marks under each note.

‘The first notes of “Within You”, to go with the words “We were talking”, would go Ga Ma Pa Ni. You just need to write the first letter, that’s enough. Now I can go to the Indian musicians, give them the music, play it through to let them hear it, and they can do it themselves.’

George spends at least three hours a day practising his sitar, sitting cross-legged with the end resting on the instep of his left foot, in the Indian manner. He has notebooks full of Indian music, written down in the Indian notation. These are the lessons he has to practise. His teacher, Ravi Shankar, has sent him some tape-recorded exercises, which he has on most of the time he isn’t playing, even during meals. He is obviously very dedicated and hard-working. But he says Indian music will take him years and years before he is any good. He is so busy learning Indian music properly that his Beatle songs are usually written in a rush. He still forgets about his own compositions until a new LP is approaching – then he thinks he should write one.

‘Within You, Without You’ was written at a friend’s house after dinner one night – Klaus Voorman, the friend from Germany, who now plays with Manfred Mann.

‘Klaus had a harmonium in his house, which I hadn’t played before. I was doodling on it, playing to amuse myself, when “Within You” started to come. The tune came first, then I got the first sentence. It came out of what we’d been doing that evening – “We were talking”. That’s as far as I got that night. I finished the rest of the words later at home.

‘The words are always a bit of a hang-up for me. I’m not very poetic. My lyrics are poor really. But I don’t take any of it seriously. It’s just a joke. A personal joke. It’s great if someone else likes it, but I don’t take it too seriously myself.’

A lot of critics didn’t understand why there was sudden laughter after ‘Within You, Without You’ on
Sergeant Pepper
.
Some said it must have been put in by the others, to mock George’s Indian music. It was completely George’s idea.

‘Well, after all that long Indian stuff you want some light relief. It’s a release after five minutes of sad music. You haven’t got to take it all that seriously, you know. You were supposed to hear the audience anyway, as they listen to Sergeant Pepper’s Show. That was the style of the album.’

His song for the
Magical Mystery Tour
, ‘Blue Jay Way’, was written during his visit to California in the early summer of 1967. The title comes from the street in Los Angeles in which he and Pattie had rented a house. They had just flown in from London and were waiting for their friend Derek Taylor (ex-Beatle press officer, now with Apple) to come and see them.

‘Derek got held up. He rang to say he’d be late. I told him on the phone that the house was in Blue Jay Way. He said he’d find it OK, he could always ask a cop.

‘I waited and waited. I felt really nackered with the flight, but I didn’t want to go to sleep till he came. There was a fog and it got later and later. To keep myself awake, just as a joke, to fill in time, I wrote a song about waiting for him in Blue Jay Way.

‘There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this rented house, which I hadn’t noticed. I messed around on this and the song came.’

All the words directly relate to him waiting for Derek Taylor – ‘There’s a fog upon LA, and my friends have lost their way …’ When he came home to Esher, he perfected the song. There is still an organ effect, very deep and booming, in the backing to the song.

In January 1968 George agreed to write his first screen music for the film
Wonderwall
. He has been asked to do more single songs, but he has usually refused. One day he was working on one for Marianne Faithfull. She’d asked him to write one for her to sing, something like ‘Within You, Without You’. He wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. He’d got the song in his head, but the words were becoming jokier and jokier. He thought they might end up too silly and he’d have to dump them.